Carleton College Announces New Faculty Appointments

Carleton College is pleased to announce the addition of seven new faculty members.

Clinton Cowan, assistant professor of geology, received his B.A. degree in geology from Carleton College. He earned his M.S. in geology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and his Ph.D., in geology, from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Before coming to Carleton, Cowan did research at Shell Research in the Netherlands and at Exxon U.S.A. in Houston, Texas.

Luís León, assistant professor of religion, earned his A.B. degree in rhetoric and Chicano studies from the University of California at Berkeley and his M.T.S. from Harvard University Divinity School. León earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He recently helped to complete a research project entitled “Block by Block: Making Pentecostalism in East Los Angeles,” and has written a chapter for the forthcoming book New Ethnic and Immigrant American Congregations. León is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including the President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship from the University of California
at Santa Barbara.

David McCandless, associate professor of theater and English, received his B.A. degree in English Literature from Carleton College. He later earned his Ph.D. in Drama and Humanities from Stanford University. Prior to coming to Carleton, he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. McCandless is the author of a forthcoming book titled Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, as well as numerous papers and articles.

Kevin Pettit, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, received his B.A. degree in physics from Carleton College. He earned both his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois. Prior to coming to Carleton, he worked as a post-doctoral research scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center. He also spent a year teaching English in Japan as part of the Japan Exchange Teaching (JET) Program.

Clare Rossini, assistant professor of English, received her B.A. degree in English from the College of St. Benedict and her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She also holds a M. Phil. degree in American Literature from Columbia University. She joined the Carleton faculty as an instructor in English in 1989. Rossini is the recipient of a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship to pursue work with poetry, essays, and critical articles. Her first book of poetry “Winter Mourning with Crow” recently won the Akron Poetry Prize.

Yasmin Saikia, assistant professor of history, earned both her B.A. degree in history and M.A. in American history from Aligarh Muslim University. She holds a second M.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and is currently at work there on her Ph.D. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships including an International Dissertation Research Fellowship. Saikia has written a forthcoming book called In the Meadows of Gold: Telling Tales of the Swargadeos in the Crossroads of Assam.

Debby Walser-Kuntz, assistant professor of biology, received her B.A. degree in biology from Concordia College. She went on to earn a M.A. and a teaching degree in secondary science from Colorado College. She is working on her Ph.D. in biomedical sciences at the Mayo Clinic, where she has served as a teaching assistant since 1991.